id love a salary cap...but I bet if there was one pirates would not meet it.. they would need a salary basement to make them spend.. id like to think if I was owner my joy would come from competing with the other owners to win rather then worrying bout profit in my bank.. like horse racing. I imagine most owners lose money and enjoy the sport.. George stienbrenner didn't give a shit about money unless he was winning..he may have lost money many years over paying his talent. but recouped it eventually.. nutting is a miser playing the fans for idiots..

i don't even want a salary cap. I want a salary basement. make it 115 million. But union Prez Tony Clark is about as good at negotiating as pet rock.

As SteelPro said, tanking can be a sound strategy. Look at the Phils right now. They are tanking BIG TIME. 45 million payroll. But they are building a roster of young studs and they will compete soon. And they will spend the war chest when the time is right. The pirates? They just keep steady at around the 5th lowest payroll and convince the rubes that they are competing each year.

All a floor and cap would do is shift the excuses. This team is F'd as long as Nutting owns it. Lets look at how baseball and the Pirates would look under an NHL style cap. NHL has a $55M floor and $75M cap. Baseball has roughly 2.3 times the revenues as the NHL. Put that multiplier on MLB and you get to about $126 million floor and a $173 million cap. Ok, so The Bucs would now have to spend $30-40 million more to reach a floor. I'm sure a good chuck of that would be made up of subsidies from additional revenue sharing. So how would the Pirates operate under such a a structure? You can almost guarantee the club will keep payroll near the floor. So the Cubs, Cards, and even the Brewers will continue to out spend the Bucs by a significant chunk. Now since the Pirates can't skimp on salary where will they skimp that is not bound by a cap? And since high revenue teams can't spend on roster payroll where will they look to invest to find advantages? My guess is the Pirates would slash the shit out of the scouting department. I mean what is the point of searching for cheap talent when you have to pay up to a floor anyway? From a business/profit standpoint scouting loses its cost efficiency when you have a floor/cap. So they likely close or sell their dominican academy, slash budget of the scouting department, pare down their number of minor league affiliates from 8 to 5. They probably try to nickle and dime on major league coaching staff too. Hurdle and Searage are expensive options. They will find guys with shorter resumes to take those jobs for probably half the salary. Meanwhile teams that were throwing money away on overpaid/underperforming veteran talent on the MLB roster will no longer be able to do that. Instead they'll shift to spend more on resources for scouting and coaching staff. Searage will get a hefty raise to be the Cubs new pitching coach. The Yankees will the buy the Pirates dominican training academy. The net result will be the same. The Pirates will still be run by a cheap miser and the team will continue a second tier team. I think this system would help the bigger spenders more than the small market clubs.

well put and I agree...wonder if mlb will ever get a cap? the current system blows..and our owner would still suck ass.. id hate the pirates leaving pnc park...so I fear a fan backlash might make the miser run for greener pastures elsewhere where he can get sweetheart deal to move into a new park. sad situation are the pirates.

Yep, as much as Steigerwald railed on Nutting, he is also playing the angle that there nothing Nutting can do and spending more money wouldn't help. BULLSHIT! They had a nice 3 year window with the stars fucking aligned! Bad cubs team, weak NL. Mediocre Cards teams. And they went FUCKING CHEAP!!!! That dickhead left that out of the article. Motherfucker is talking out both sides of his mouth.

Nutting is the Mike/Paul Brown of MLB. Puddle around with mediocre to bad teams but turn a profit.

_________________"Rational arguments don't usually work on religious people. Otherwise, there wouldn't be religious people." --Doris Egan